NT Department of Territory Families, Housing and Communities remove foster children

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has slammed the treatment of two foster carers who had an Aboriginal baby and toddler removed from their care after reporting concerns of sexual abuse.

Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has slammed the treatment of two foster carers who had an Aboriginal baby and toddler removed from their care after reporting concerns of sexual abuse.

Sky News this week revealed the case of Lindy* and Denise*, two Northern Territory woman who had agreed to care for the baby and toddler.

The children were removed from the care of the non-Indigenous women after they made a mandatory notification about the highly sexualised behaviour being exhibited by the older child.

NT Senator Jacinta Price has called out the injustice some Indigenous children experience while in the foster system. Picture: Pema Tamang Pakhrin

Lindy said the Department of Territory Families, Housing and Communities then falsely accused her of the sexual exploitation and assault of the child.

“The situation we have here looks dangerously close to Indigenous children being intentionally taken away from good stable foster families because of their racial heritage, when they dare to raise questions about how these children were treated prior to coming into their care,” Senator Price said.

“If these reports are true, they are a chilling example of both the dysfunction in out-of-home care and the sexual abuse of Indigenous children.”

Senator Price said children needed stable homes to grow up in if we want them to flourish and become contributing members of society.

“It is also obvious that Indigenous children are treated differently and left in situations of dysfunction because of the Labor’s foolish obsession with the need to place Indigenous children in Indigenous homes with the result of taking them away from safe and stable environments,” she said.

“That isn’t a standard we apply to Australian children of other heritage, so why is this government continuing to apply a double standard to indigenous children to their detriment?”

“We should be incredibly grateful whenever we find people, of whatever racial heritage, who are self-sacrificing enough to provide a safe and loving home for some of our most vulnerable children to grow up in.

“For all of their lip service about closing the gap and wanting to see improvement in the lives of Indigenous people, the actions of the Albanese government make it close to impossible for the lives of these children to be improved.”

The Department of Territory Families, Housing and Communities has declined to answer specific questions about the case.

“We cannot comment on individual cases investigated by our child protection teams,” the department said in a statement.

The department said its child protection staff were qualified professionals who always put the safety of children first.

“We take all concerns about child safety extremely seriously and allegations of child harm are always investigated,” it said.

INITIAL: Foster carers lose custody of children after reporting abuse concerns

Two Northern Territory foster carers had an Aboriginal baby and toddler removed from their care after making a mandatory report raising concerns the older child had been sexually abused.

Instead of investigating their concerns, the carers say the Department of Territory Families, Housing and Communities falsely accused one of them of the abuse and removed the two children.

Denise* and Lindy*, a mother and daughter, volunteered to be foster carers last year because they wanted to give back to the community.

But they say their act of goodwill has turned into a nightmare because of the way they have been treated by the department.

Lindy said they had at first only agreed to care for one of the children – a baby who had been removed at birth from her ice-addicted mother.

The NT foster carers raised concerns the older child (pictured) had been sexually abused. Picture: Supplied

“We picked him up from NICU (the neonatal intensive care unit at Royal Darwin Hospital) and he was just a few days old. A beautiful little boy,” she said.

As they were driving home, they received a call from the department asking them to call in to their office. There they were asked if they could also care for the baby’s 18-month-old brother.

“We weren’t really informed we would be getting him and we were told he was a three-year-old boy so we loaded up and took the little fella and the bubby,” Denise said.

“The three-year-old ended up being 18 months old.”

The carers took the children home and looked after them as if they were their own.

But they soon started to notice concerning behaviour in the older child.

Denise said he was displaying highly sexualised behaviour and would scream whenever they tried to change his nappy.

“He was showing a lot of concerning things that weren’t normal for a little fella,” she said.

“He’d either witnessed something, something had happened to him or he’d been involved in something more.”

They took their concerns to Territory Families but were told there was nothing abnormal about the behaviour they had reported.

But when they took the child to see a general practitioner, the doctor informed them they were legally required to make a notification of suspected child abuse.

“The doctor said we had to report, do a mandatory report ourselves,” Denise said.

“It was done and no sooner was it done, within an hour we had a phone call from SARC, the Sexual Assault Referral Centre and they said these (things) were very, very, concerning.”

Lindy and Denise said the moment they made the notification, their relationship with Territory Families turned sour.

The children were taken from the carers after the abuse was reported. Picture: Supplied

“Territory Families were cross,” Denise said.

“Territory Families were furious we had made a complaint.”

Two months later, Lindy received an email informing her the children would be removed from their care and put “in a better environment for their development”.

A month later they received a call from the Foster and Kinship Association informing them Territory Families workers would soon be at their property to take the children.

“They walked up to our house and said, ‘as per section 84 we’re taking the kids,” Lindy said.

Section 84 relates to allegations of abuse in care, but they were not informed what the allegations were.

“The team leader put the baby in my face and said ‘do you want to say goodbye’. And for a family that had just been accused, alleged, of something that we didn’t even know what we had done, that was horrific,” Lindy said.

“To this day I will picture that moment for the rest of my life.”

Lindy said she had to press the department to find out details of the allegations that had been made against her.

She was eventually sent an email telling her she had been accused of sexual exploitation and assault.

She said the sexual exploitation allegation was “word-for-word” the same as the concerns they had raised in their own mandatory notification.

At around the same time, she was sent an email informing her the investigation into the allegations she had raised about the toddler had been closed, even though no-one had sought any further information from her or Denise.

“The report has no further action,” she was told in an email from a child protection practitioner on May 26.

“Allegations do not meet threshold to investigate.”

Instead, the department would investigate Lindy for alleged sexual exploitation.

Lindy said she believed the allegations had been made against her as retribution for making the notification.

“Upon reflecting, these two accusations I deny and will continue to deny because they never happened and never would happen in my care,” she said.

“These are two nasty, nasty, nasty accusations that someone we believe in Territory Families has falsely made against us. They are disgusting.”

“For Territory Families to come out and issue these accusations is disgusting, it’s appalling and it’s bad management.”

Lindy and Denise hired a lawyer to attend a meeting with the department to discuss the allegation made against Lindy.

The department has told them the investigation is still incomplete as they have been unable to interview Denise, even though she was at the meeting.

“For the past month I’ve had this allegation of sexual exploitation against me, which has almost cost me my job,” Lindy said.

The issue of Indigenous children being place with non-Indigenous foster carers has a controversial history in the Northern Territory.

In a 2010 report into the death of a 12-year-old Aboriginal girl who died of sepsis while in the care of her aunt, Coroner Greg Cavanagh found child protection workers were placing too much emphasis on the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle, which sees Indigenous children only placed with non-Indigenous carers as a last resort.

But following the 2017 Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children, the NT Labor Government vowed to do more to ensure Aboriginal children remained with family.

The Department of Territory Families, Housing and Communities did not answer a series of questions about this case, including what evidence it had to make the allegations against Lindy, whether it now agreed the allegations were baseless and whether it would be issuing an apology.

In a statement the department said: “Our dedicated child protection staff are qualified professionals who prioritise the safety of children and as an organisation, we put the needs of children first.”

The department said it was unable to comment on individual cases investigated by its child protection team.

Lindy and Denise said they were devastated to have the two children taken out of their care, and now have no idea where the children are or if they are safe.

They said their experience had been horrific, and they would never foster another child.

“You’re not protected in the NT,” Lindy said.

“You’re not protected as a person.

“Anyone can make accusations against someone. And it can end them.”

Denise said she was appalled by the conduct of Territory Families.

“You take someone’s child off them, for good reason I imagine, put them in a safe environment, but don’t rock the boat because Territory Families will come for you,” she said.

*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the carers and children.

Matt Cunningham is the Northern Australia correspondent for Sky News